Pater: high places and irrational fears...

Pater: high places and irrational fears...  At right, Pater overlooking the scenery in Garrapata State Park, in April, 2006.

High places and irrational fears...

My dad loved to find a high place with a clear view of the surrounding countryside.  Searching for one of these was an objective on just about every mountain hike we ever took with him.  His favorite sort of high place was on the top of a cliff – the higher and steeper, the better.  He loved to go sit on the edge of such a cliff, legs dangling over the side, and encouraged us kids to do it as well.  No helmets, no safety lines – just us little munchkins, sitting on the edge of a cliff that might be hundreds of feet high.  I wonder if people do that these days?  I imagine here in California, that might get a parent arrested for endangering their children.

My mom never willingly allowed this to happen.  She didn't go on the hikes with us, but if we happened across a roadside overlook that involved a cliff, and my dad tried to get us over to the edge, she'd start hollering at him.  I recall one such incident at Cedar Breaks National Monument, where we parked our Volkswagen Microbus and we all clambered out to the overlook – which had nice, solid iron railings to keep people from falling off the cliff.  Naturally, my dad walked around the railings with some of us kids tagging along, and found a nice rock to sit on and dangle his feet over the edge.  I remember looking back to see my mother's horrified face as it dawned on her what we were about to do.  It was a strikingly beautiful scene, too – the red rock cliffs of Cedar Breaks to our right, the dark green evergreens at the top of the cliffs and to our left, my loudly hollering mom right at the intersection.  My dad compromised by holding us on his lap, one at a time.  My mom didn't think much of his compromise :)

I don't know if she ever realized that dangling off the top of a cliff was a frequent feature of our hikes...

The apparent dare-devil cliff hanging was just one example of something my dad did a lot of, most especially with Scott and myself (the two oldest boys): challenges requiring physical courage.  The common theme amongst these things was that they weren't really dangerous, they just looked like it.  Sitting on a cliff certainly would be dangerous if you fell off, but ... you don't fall off chairs, generally, or anything else you might sit on – so why should you fall off a cliff?  That was my dad's logic, and he it applied to all sorts of things.  For instance, if we saw a log over a creek while on a hike, my dad would seize on that as an opportunity to challenge us.

On a similar theme, if he spotted something that we were scared of, irrationally so, he'd patiently work with us to get us over it.  One example: I remember watching my dad soldering a copper pipe once, in our basement – I think he was fixing a leak.  He used a small propane blowtorch to do this.  I was quite young, but my dad loved to teach me how to use tools, so he tried to have me “help” him.  When he saw that I was afraid of the torch (and I was!), he stopped working on the leak, took the torch and I over to a vise on our workbench, and spent the next half hour or so getting me familiar with the torch, teaching me how to operate it, and teaching me how to be safe with it.  At the end of that, I wasn't afraid of it any more – and then we went back and finished fixing the leak.  I was probably 7 or 8 years old at the time, so I'm sure my “assistance” made the job take several times longer than it should have :)

My dad was scornful of people who were unnecessarily afraid of things, and he worked hard to make sure his kids were not amongst them.  There were many ways he worked at this, including the ones I've mentioned here.  I can't speak for my siblings, but at least in my own case those lessons stuck; my dad's efforts worked.  There are many things I've done that I'm not at all sure I'd ever have attempted had my dad not instilled this habit of overcoming irrational fears in me.  Skydiving, for example (though I'm not sure he would ever have done that! :).  But the first example that popped into my mind is one I don't think I've ever written about before.

It happened when I was in the U.S. Navy, I think around 1975 (I'm not sure of the exact year here).  My ship, the USS Long Beach CGN-9, was moored at the Naval Air Station North Island in the San Diego Bay.  The ship needed to visit a shipyard for some repair work, and there were two suitable west coast facilities: one at at the 32nd Street Naval Station just a few miles south in San Diego Bay, the other in Bremerton, Washington, over 1,000 miles to the north.  The choice of 32nd Street would be a no-brainer but for one small detail: nobody was certain that the ship would fit under the Coronado Bay Bridge.  The USS Long Beach was at that time the tallest ship in the entire U.S. Navy.  There was enough uncertainty in estimates of the ship's height and the bridge's height that nobody was about to just sail the ship under the bridge.  So the powers-that-were decided that what they needed was for someone to stand high up on the ship's “mast” (not just a pole, but rather a latticework of metal) with a surveyor's transit-level as the ship was slowly moved toward the bridge.  They would dangle a target below the bridge to aim the transit at.  If the transit showed that the target was above the transit's level, the ship would fit under the bridge.  Otherwise the ship was too tall and they'd have to go all the way to Bremerton.

They needed a volunteer to stand up on the mast with the transit.  That sounded like fun to me, and I knew it wasn't really dangerous, so I immediately volunteered – and, it turns out, I was the only guy to do so (and before some feminazi accuses me of sexism, the ship had an all-male crew).  If I had not volunteered, they would have hired an actual surveyor to do the job.  But it was me, instead – and I got to stand way, way up on the mast, on a little platform with a surveyor's transit-level.  I had a safety line and harness, so I wasn't actually in any danger of falling.  I had sound-powered headphones on, and was talking directly to the ship's bridge.  Whether we went under the bay bridge or not was completely up to what I reported – effectively me, the lowly enlisted guy, was conning the ship!  It was a bright and beautiful sunny day, and tugboats nudged us down the bay toward the bridge.  I found the dangling target, focused on it as we approached the bridge – and discovered that the ship was at least 5 feet too tall to fit under the bridge.  I called that down, and we turned around and went back to our mooring – and a week later, left for Bremerton, Washington.

If my dad hadn't taught me those lessons about overcoming irrational fears, would I ever have volunteered for that adventure?  I suspect not.  I've observed over the years that overcoming irrational fears often leads to great adventures.  Debbie can attest to this – many are the times that we've done something on a trip that most people would consider wild and crazy, but which turned out to be adventures whose memory we still cherish.  Others may disagree, but I consider that the courage to challenge irrational fears is one of the most important lessons for living that my dad ever taught me.  His style would be to deny any credit for it, and to attribute it to his kids – but I know better, and I hope that there was a time he took some satisfaction over his parenting successes...